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The Energy Spectator
The Weekly Standard Goes Green
A major conservative weekly falls for Amory Lovins’ latest anti-nuclear spiel.
After years of taking a sensible approach to energy, the Weekly Standard has gone green. Last week the editors kicked off their “Energy Policy in 2011” series with a treatise from none other than the pied piper of solar energy, Amory Lovins.
Needless to say, Lovins informs Standard readers that nuclear is a monstrously unworkable technology and that no reactors would have ever risen out of the ground without lavish subsidies from the government. This should come as no surprise to anyone. Lovins has been campaigning against nuclear for the past 25 years. What’s news is that the editors of an esteemed conservative magazine have decided to dance to the tune.
The trouble with Lovins’ argument begins right in the second paragraph where he begins outlining the reason why the construction of reactors entails what he defines as “Nuclear Socialism:”
We got a taste three decades ago. Congress grew infatuated with the promises of nuclear promoters. It overrode the risk assessment of private capital markets, and expanded subsidies for nuclear projects to $0.08 per kilowatt-hour — often more than investors risked or than the power could be sold for. This seduced previously prudent utilities and regulators into a nuclear binge that Forbes in 1985 called “the largest managerial disaster in business history.”
The source for this figure is a study called “Nuclear Power as Taxpayer Patronage,” by Doug Koplow, of Earth Track, published by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. Turn to page 24, where Koplow charts these subsidies, however, and you find the biggest contributor — 3.7 cents per kWh — is a loan guarantee program that wasn’t passed by Congress until 2005. Unlike other loan guarantees, it also requires the nuclear industry to pay for the program. Southern Electric received the first and only guarantee of $8.3 billion last June for its Vogtle reactors in Georgia, but hasn’t begun construction yet.
The second largest “subsidy” in the Koplow paper — 2.5 cents per kWh — is the Price-Anderson Bill, long a target of anti-nuclear ire. First adopted in 1956, the bill organized insurance companies to provide $60 million in coverage with the federal government pledged to pick up another $500 million. In 1967, the system was shifted to no-fault basis, with utilities waiving their right to defend on claims in exchange for a cap on liability. Workmen’s Compensation works the same way. Today the government is completely off the hook. Private insurance provides $300 million and individual reactors can be assessed $100 million apiece for an accident at another reactor, for a total of $12 billion. The industry insures itself. The only claims ever made were $90 million at Three Mile Island and private insurers paid them. Although the program has lowered costs for utilities, it has never cost the government a dime.
A third “subsidy” listed by Koplow — a production tax credit of 1.8 cents per kWh of delivered electricity — was also adopted in 2005 and has not yet been awarded. In any case, it only applies to the first 6000 megawatts built after 2005. This compares to the production tax credit — now at 2.1 cents per kWh — that has been paid to wind and solar facilities since 1979 and has cost the government billions. According to a 2007 report by the Energy Information Agency, subsidy and support for wind and solar were $23.37 and $24.34 per megawatt-hour respectively. The subsidies for conventional forms of generation were 25 cents for oil and natural gas, 44 cents for coal, and $1.59 for nuclear. President Obama’s stimulus package contained $90 billion in subsidies, loan guarantees, and direct payouts to renewable energy — the kind that Lovins wants to substitute for nuclear power.
To this must be added the 26 state “renewable portfolio mandates” that require utilities to build wind and solar facilities or buy from those who do. Ninety percent of the generating capacity built to conform to these mandates has been windmills — which is why there has been such a surge of windmill construction around the country. No one has ever mandated that anyone build a nuclear reactor.
Our entire fleet of 104 reactors was built in the 1970s and 1980s without any subsidies or mandates and paid for in full by the utilities. Most were “turnkey” projects built by Westinghouse, General Electric, or Babcock & Wilcox. All three companies lost huge amounts of money but soldiered on because they thought they were laying claim to the future. Now that their construction costs have been retired, the owners are profiting handsomely. Many reactors make more than $1 million a day. In the midst of the oil price run-up in 2007, Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal proposed a windfall profits tax on the state’s two Millstone reactors because they were making so much money. As Jack Bailey, vice president of the Tennessee Valley Authority, says, “No matter how expensive a nuclear plant is at the beginning, twenty years later they all look good.”
If nuclear reactors are difficult to build right now, it has nothing to do with the nature of the technology. The principal reason is that America’s nuclear industry has already been socialized —with the utilities still paying the bills. The entire industry is now one huge conglomerate run out of the 18-story building in Rockville, Maryland that houses the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Any company trying to build or operate a nuclear reactor can barely buy a broom without clearing it with the front office at the NRC. In 2005 I visited the Cooper Nuclear Station in Nebraska. While touring the plant I noticed a tricycle sitting on the sidewalk and asked its purpose. Plant officials said that employees who had to walk long distances between buildings in the winter had complained of the cold. Because no motorized vehicles are allowed within the compound, they asked if they could ride bicycles. The NRC considered the matter for eight months before deciding that bicycles were too dangerous. They would, however, allow employees to ride a tricycle. One employee later asked if the tricycle would have a seat belt, but was informed that would not be necessary.
Asking permission to build a nuclear reactor means applying to the NRC for a combined construction-and-operating license (COL), which could take five-to-ten years except nobody really knows because the NRC has not issued a license since 1976. NRG Energy, the first American company to apply since 1973, filed in 2007. It is still nowhere near the end of the process. When he assumed the chairmanship of the NRC in 2009, Gregory Jaczko — a former aide to Senator Harry Reid — said he hoped the NRC could issue a license by the time his term ends in 2014. He may have been optimistic.
The NRC has not even approved the design of the Westinghouse AP1000, a new model that is under construction at four different sites in China. David Blee, executive director of the Nuclear Infrastructure Council, says that industry officials watch the NRC the way foreign policy experts once watched the Kremlin. “If Commissioner [Kristine] Svinicki mentions the AP1000 in a speech, that means something may be happening with regard to the application,” he says. Outside the Byzantine Empire, you could hardly find a better historical example of bureaucratic sclerosis.
The rub is that the applying companies pay for all this. Unlike any other federal agency, applicants before the NRC must pay a “service fee” of $260 an hour for having the NRC review its application. The process is open-ended and could easily run to $100 million — although once again no one knows because no one has ever completed the process. Constellation Energy and its partner, Électricité de France, had spent $500 million in trying to obtain a license to build a third reactor at Calvert Cliffs, Maryland, when Constellation finally gave up on the project two weeks ago.
Nuclear reactors are expensive, make no mistake. They easily cost $6 billion apiece, maybe more. But 75 percent of the cost is in the construction. Once completed, reactors are very cheap to operate — which is what makes them so attractive to utility long-range planners. What makes reactors prohibitively risky is the chance they may never be built or allowed to operate. The Shoreham Plant on Long Island cost $5 billion and was prohibited from opening because New York Governor Mario Cuomo refused to participate in drawing up an emergency evacuation plan — a lesson not quickly forgotten by the industry. In order to overcome these misgivings, Congress adopted both the production tax credit and the loan guarantees as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. These are the first direct subsidies ever offered to the nuclear industry.
Even now, the prospects for avoiding the construction delays and regulatory revisions of the 1980s do not seem promising. The Vogtle project in Georgia, the only plan to be awarded a loan guarantee, has received permission to begin site clearance. Last July, after inspecting the work, the NRC decided that the dirt Southern Electric was using to fill the site was unsatisfactory. Southern was told to go further afield and spend more money for better dirt. A month later the NRC discovered that Shaw, the major subcontractor, had asked prospective employees about previous drug and alcohol use but had not required them to fill out a written form as prescribed by NRC rules. The Commission closed down the project for six weeks.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (54) | Leave a comment
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Intelligent Design| 10.26.10 @ 7:17AM
The U.S. should have been building nuclear power plants for the last 30 years as a matter of national security, in the same manner that we manufactured weapons at a breakneck speed during WW II. Our mentally challenged elected representatives just don't get it, so here is another reason to vote against incumbents. Then let's dismantle the Department of Energy, to get the ball rolling.
Oppenheimer| 10.26.10 @ 8:00AM
Using "emminent dommaine" I propose the Kennedy Compund at Hyanis, Hampton Bay on Long Island etc as sights for nuclear reactors.
Paul Hilsenrath| 10.26.10 @ 8:18AM
Over the last six months or so I have not done much reading on the TWS web site. It seemed to me that they were throwing softballs when compared to National Review or this site.
This article confirms my "gut feeling" that Bill Kristol is "conservative lite" and that the articles appearing in his magazine are "less filling" or not to put too fine a point on it, "lite" on substance.
I'd like to see Bill Kristol replaced by say, Andrew C. McCarthy on Fox News. I think that would liven things up a bit.
Wasn't Bill one of the "conservative" journalists to be invited to have lunch with Obama?
Best regards,
Paul H.
All Hail The Stupid Party!| 10.26.10 @ 11:37AM
Yes Paul, Bill Kristol was one of the "conservative" journalists to be invited to meet with Obama. The others were George Will (the meeting took place at his house), Charles Krauthammer (yes, THAT Charles Krauthammer. The same Charles Krauthammer who scolded voters in Deleware for not choosing RINO Mike Castle as U.S. Senate nominee), & David Brooks (no surprise there). I don't listen to or read anything by any of these phonies since then & their actions since meeting with Obama prove to me they are not conservative in the least. RINOs need to be made extinct.
DWPittelli | 10.26.10 @ 12:39PM
I agree that David Brooks is the liberals' favorite conservative because he's not a conservative, even though he may admire Milton Friedman. But the rest of them have earned their conservative bona fides if anyone has. OK, George Will is a bit softer than he used to be. He's also pushing 70. Give him a break. Krauthammer may have acted in a manner contrary to the interest of conservatives (or of Republicans). But I think even an ultraconservative could find reason to prefer Castle over O'Donnell, based on verbal own-goals and thus electability, but I understand that you might think conservatives might have a duty not to undermine conservative candidates with such public criticism. Still, can you understand that a TV commentator might consider his duty to be honest (perhaps especially if said honest opinion is provocative) higher than his duty to conservative candidates? Someone working for a party or even pressure group, would of course have the tactical to pretend to be happy about O'Donnell. This does not necessarily make the latter more conservative than the former.
Chalkdust| 10.26.10 @ 3:32PM
Bah Humbug! What possible help would a "Senator Castle", RINO of the highest order, be too the people of America? The days of accepting a empty suit (McCain, Huckabee, Castle, Romney) in place of a true conserative is over. As talking heads are concerned, once one realilize they are talking to make points for/to other talking heads as cocktail party fodder, the sooner one stops throwing house slippers at the TV.
Quartermaster| 10.26.10 @ 7:16PM
Weekly Standard is a Neocon magazine, not a conservative magazine. Anyone that believes TWS is a conservative mag should now have their eyes opened by Lovins' screed.
National Review is headed down that same road.
There is a time when you have to accept the real possibility of defeat with a given candidate because the "electable" candidate isn't a win. That's the case with Castle. he might carry "R" after his name at first, but if anyone thinks he would have been much different that Snarlin' Arlen, Lindsey Grahamnesty, or Juan McCain is deluded. It's better to have a man that will try to stab you in the chest than one who will stabbed you in the back as the three just named morons have done time and again. This isn't about "purity." It's about trust, and Castle isn't worthy of it, as he shown repeatedly in the house.
David March| 10.27.10 @ 4:38PM
I fully agree. I still read TWS, but in the same way I read The American Conservative (which is the last refuge of isolationish conservativism), or Reason.com, fully knowing what the individual biases are. Doesnt change the fact that there articles can be enjoyable, informative or fun, or the fact that I may well completely disagree with the authors there. The only pure Conservative Website/Magazine I read is this one it seems.
Intelligent Design| 10.26.10 @ 12:05PM
I cancelled my subscription to TWS about 4 years ago after reading an article telling me that Republicans could not play hardball against the Democrats and still win. The pitch was made that it was hopeless to oppose Demos if the public wanted bigger government. This was the same sort of lame, defeatist mentality that allowed the Demos to gain control of Congress in January 2007. Since then, the national debt has increased by 57%. Now Obama and his comrades plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire, resulting in a tax increase of about $1 trillion. More taxes mean less private property, and economic ruin.
JimH| 10.26.10 @ 8:19AM
Property rights and a free market economy are inherently green because they encourage the most efficient use of resources and require compensation when polluting someone’s property. Many pollution issues are caused by various subsidies, taxes and regulations which distort the market and mandate solutions which a cost benefit analysis would find ridiculous. It is unfortunate the Weekly Standard has lost sight of this.
Becky| 10.26.10 @ 9:55AM
The poor have always been green; hand me down clothes, garage sale specials, etch.
John M| 10.26.10 @ 10:00AM
I was delighted to see a reference to the "backyard reactor" again. I think it was first announced in this Guardian article in 2008 (http://tinyurl.com/5fqwh4) and I've been waiting ever since for these devices to change the face of energy delivery here and abroad. Silly me. I had no idea of the choke hold applied by the NRC to every niggling issue. Tricycles. Good grief! It's nothing more than "mother may I" on a grand scale.
Ken (Old Texican)| 10.26.10 @ 10:04AM
AMSPEC Editors,
Thank you so much for Mr. Tucker's article.
I had read a similar article some years ago and have been beating the drum for "modular" nuke plants ever since.
I do have one difference, with Mr. Tucker. As delightful as a modular plant close by every town would be, in the real world in which we live today would be untenable.
Too much security would be required for that dispersal of nuke plants. Instead though, we could line up a bunch of nuke modules like D-cell batteries...then route power out in a web from well secured centers.
owyheewine| 10.26.10 @ 10:31AM
Those technologically beautiful small plants practically run themselves. That means no huge workforce to actually run them. No need for highly skilled technically competent workers. That leaves a lot of personnel dollars available for security, which can be filled by journalists, Lovins believers and other non skilled workers. What a boon to solving our unemployment problem.
Too Many Tims| 10.26.10 @ 12:23PM
Safety? Check this out:
http://www.popularmechanics.co.....r?click=pp
John M| 10.26.10 @ 1:19PM
Dear Ken,
The reactors in the article I cited (http://tinyurl.com/5fqwh4) are gonna be hard to tamper with:
"The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground."
David W| 10.26.10 @ 10:18AM
I wonder what we would find if we were to look at the charitable contributions of the staff at NRC. Would they be heavy contributors to Sierra Club and other groups opposed to nuclear energy? That is the only explanation I can think of - the people at NRC are against nuclear energy and will do what they can to delay and stop it (who knows, they may even be in the pay of the green energy people supported by Al Gore and John Kerry).
Siegfried X| 10.26.10 @ 10:22AM
The Weekly Standard is a ne0-con publication. First generation neo-cons left the Democratic Party when McGovern's pacifists took over in 1972; they left because they wanted military action against communism.
Today's neo-cons are the same thing: "war Democrats". They agree with the Democrats about everything besides war.
That is what has nearly destroyed the Republican Party by turning it into a Democrat clone: the internal betrayal by neo-cons (along with the Republican establishment).
This is obvious from the schizophrenic behavior of the Republican leadership in which that flip-flop between supporting Democratic legislation to opposing it on some technicality (but never a principle). Like neo-con McCain ran in 2008 in favor of amnesty, cap & trade, and shutting Guantanamo. Yet within a few months after McCain lost, the Republican establishment was attacking cap & trade and the closure of Guantanamo.
And unfortunately even if Republicans win the House, within a few months the neos like Weekly Standard will be talking about "bipartisan" big government social programs. They are just talking a little conservative before the election.
All Hail The Stupid Party!| 10.26.10 @ 11:12AM
Bingo! I Couldn't have said it better myself. Take care & GOD bless Siegfried X!
Sheila| 10.26.10 @ 11:25AM
Well said, Siegfried X. I've been trying to get my husband to cancel his subscription for some time; he's strongly pro-nuclear energy so perhaps this will help sway him. Calling Kristol a neocon is actually far too polite and mild. As Charles Murray wrote yesterday, "When it comes to the schools where they were educated, the degrees they hold, the Zip codes where they reside and the television shows they watch, I doubt there is much to differentiate" the conservative elites from the liberal elites. Decline and fall.
Roy| 10.26.10 @ 1:03PM
That analysis is 30+ years out of date. It lives on primarily in the minds of those who disagree with Democrats about everything but war, aboutwhich they strongly agree with Democrats and declare their agreement with Code Pink to be the only true conservative position.
Norman Podhoretz argued against pornography, in favor of Pat Robertson, against gay marriage, against "affirmative action", etc, etc. He is regularly written out of the human race by the Left for this. And he's actually one of the people this comes the closest to being true about.
The word "bipartisan" is about as popular there as it is here and I have pretty much never seen an article advocating "big government social programs". I have never seen them push a Democrat over a Republican. Matthew Continetti wrote an entire book defending Sarah Palin. Etc. etc. etc.
William Tucker is not pro or anti-government, just pr0-nuclear. He has, in these pages themselves, promoted warmodoom alarmism as a way to push nuclear.
I haven't seen the Lovins article but if he was calling for renewables to meet the test of the market, even if he didn't really mean it, why not go around bragging that he said it?
The whole "neocon" business is a distraction, falling for which will bring tears of joy to the Daily Kos, amidst roaring laughter at our idiocy. There are no "paleocons" vs. "neocons" these days, there are conservatives who disagree about foreign policy. I disagree with Rand Paul about foreign policy but the idea of putting him in the same class with any Democrat is ridiculous. Same thing with Kristol.
Richard| 10.26.10 @ 10:42AM
Amory Lovins is a quack whose record of environmental prediciton is 100 % wrong. His proposals are nutty and can't work. He are Paul Erlich must be twins.
Spaulding| 10.28.10 @ 8:12PM
"He and Paul Ehrlich must be twins."
You are on the right track Richard. Lovins, who fraudulently claimed a degree in physics, was brought to U.C. Berkeley by Obama Energy Secretary John Holdren, who is an Ehrlich acolyte. The details are daunting, as William Tucker, perhaps the best debunker ever knows, but facts are what they are. No commercial source of energy has the per/unit safety record of having caused not a single death from its intrinsic technology, nuclear fission. The ignorant and the left will say "what about Chernoble?" Chernoble was not, and not just because it was built by a Communist governemnt, a commercial power plant. It was a design similar to the earliest Fermi designs, graphite piles, and was designed to produce near weapons grade plutonium. It was accessed by swinging doors and had no containment whatsoever. Still, its meltdown and fire killed fewer people, between 20 and 60, than a single year of operation of typical coal plant kills from respiratory problems in a year (about 200). And the coal plants typically fail NRC standards for nucleotide emissions because coal contains natural radioactive isotopes.
Lovins is a master, like his fellow traveler and comrade Holdren, of detail. Few have the time or incentive to correct every spewed detail. He is a skilled guru of Marxist rhetoric, like Holdren. Lovins has made a comfortable living, like Holdren and Ehrlich, by being wrong about just about all his "scientific" claims. Most of the cost figures of nuclear power are impossibly skewed because cost overruns, not incidentally, accompanied generous salaries for lawyers of for-profit wings of environmental activist groups such as The Natural Resources Defense Fund. When money is loaned to a licensed plant the interest accrues while lawyers are paid. Many plants spent more than a decade paying interest, and going bankrupt as a result, that the cost figures ironically reflect mostly the success of people like Lovins and Holdren and, yes, Ralph Nader, whose generous income came from the trial bar, whose members were tithed ten percent for Nader.
France exports electric power, has no waste problems, and has the cleanest air in Europe. Amory Lovins and John Holdren helped the U.S. to this impending collapse, probably by design. China's leaders, most of those in senior positions with engineering and scientific backgrounds, has an announced plans to build 124 nuclear plants over the next twenty years. They are ahead of schedule. They will fix the problem air of Bejing with technology the U.S. developed, and will shortly surpass (if they haven't already) the manufacturing capacity of the U.S. You can believe dilittantes Amory Lovins and John Holdren (also a Marxist but who does have a physics degree, but never did any science), or you can look at the countries overcoming the shackles of centrally planned economies.
Yosemeti Sam| 10.26.10 @ 10:48AM
" ... Last week the editors kicked off their "Energy Policy in 2011" series with a treatise from none other than the pied piper of solar energy, Amory Lovins...."
Could it be that this Weekly Standard article was simply an offered juxtapose to future rebuttive articles in their "Energy Policy in 2011" series?
Barnes and Kristol: that's it - right?
JimH| 10.26.10 @ 10:55AM
It’s kind of funny how people’s perceptions of risk are. I lived for years not too far away from a huge natural gas tank. It was built, I think in the early 1900’s. No one thought anything about it. But you talk about building a nuclear plant which gives off less radiation then the granite used in Grand Central Station and people freak out. This is what comes from how science and math are taught in public schools.
CJohnson| 10.26.10 @ 11:26AM
....then they took away our matches and lighters. The next generation will be begging to be allowed to make fire, and their offspring will not know how.
james wilson| 10.26.10 @ 12:11PM
The Weekly Standard did not cross any lines. They are 1960's liberals, and we know where that led.
Too Many Tims | 10.26.10 @ 12:19PM
An excellent article ( a little technical) on new nuclear reactor technologies:
http://www.popularmechanics.co.....347?page=5
Ken (Old Texican)| 10.26.10 @ 3:58PM
Too Many,
Thank you for those informative articles' links.
Sandlot9| 10.26.10 @ 3:27PM
The Weekly Standard is becoming more and more disappointing as the conservative guard in that publication gets wimpier and wimpier and less conservative. My subscription runs out soon. Good riddance.
Euclid3.14| 10.26.10 @ 5:02PM
I couldn't help but notice a large amount of misinformation in this article. (Notice he cites sources in the refutation of liberal propaganda but not the anti-NRC portions) Several examples:
"the NRC has not issued a license since 1976"
- the last license issued by the NRC to operate a nuclear reactor was Watts Bar Unit 1 in 1995. The NRC has also issued Construction Authorizations and Construction/operating licenses to 2 fuel facilities. The NRC has also issued 4 Early Site Permits
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/esp.html
And also the Limited Work Authorization (by definition a partial construction permit) for Vogtle units 3 and 4 which allows for much more than clearing the trees from the site.
"The NRC has not even approved the design of the Westinghouse AP1000"
The NRC has approved, certified, and incorporated by refrence 4 designs into the code of Federal Regulations (See 10CFR Part 52 Appendices A-D) one of which is revision 15 of the Westinghouse AP1000 design. (The NRC is currently reviewing revisions 16 and 17.)
"What makes reactors prohibitively risky is the chance they may never be built or allowed to operate. "
10 CFR 52 actually guarantees the licensee the right to load fuel once all the ITAAC have been met.
"The Vogtle project in Georgia, the only plan to be awarded a loan guarantee, has received permission to begin site clearance."
Actually construction has already started.
"No reactor will ever be built under this kind of oversight. I frankly doubt the Vogtle plant will go ahead, even though it may one day receive permission to begin actual construction."
-see above
"The possibilities for endless regulatory delay -- the cause of the 1980s cost overruns -- are just too great."
Anyone interested in what actually went wrong during the last phase of US reactor construction should review NUREG-1055. Section 2 has an excellent summary. The root cause was determined to be lack of quality over site by the owners and failure by the NRC to recognize the problem early on.
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/.....ff/sr1055/
I challenge readers to actually read the NRC's inspection reports concerning the dirt and alcohol issues at Vogtle and remember: there's lots of misleading propaganda on both sides.
jrjr| 10.26.10 @ 5:04PM
The Weakly (sp) Standard is aptly named in its current model. Kristol and Barnes who are the routine spokesmen on Fox are very marginal - Kristol, a smug little guy and Barnes, uh uh uh uh are terrible and should be replaced.
bill | 10.26.10 @ 5:57PM
America's energy policy is based on bribes. Senators from coal states, princes from Saudi Arabia, and subsidized makers of windmills and solar all have lots of money. They get it by charging high prices for energy and will be out of work if there is clean, cheap energy like that produced by nuclear reactors. Those who keep us from cheap energy are, in many ways, like organized crime, shutting down businesses that won't pay "protection". Those against nuclear energy may be assumed to have been bribed. Heavily.
Paul| 10.26.10 @ 6:16PM
NRC should be on the short list of defunded Government agencies. Slashing NRC budget by 50% and firing NRC chairman would be a good start. You will see how fast things can change, once no work is awarded with no pay.
c. j. acworth| 10.26.10 @ 6:31PM
The green freaks have apparently won (pending court fights) their battle to shut down Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, just across the river from my home in N.H. An output of 620 MW (rated) to be replaced with what? They want wind, most likely. About six miles north of me is the Lempster Mt. wind farm. 12 wind turbines strung out along a few miles of ridge line with a rated output of 25 MW, an actual output of maybe 8 MW if we're lucky. There are plenty of nuke designs that will give 25 MW (actual) and fit inside my barn with room left over for my F-250. Wind and solar are just too diffuse. You have to build huge collectors to gather enough to do anything useful, and just as you get them built, the wind dies or the sun goes down and you have to build a real generator (coal, gas, nuke) to keep the lights on. An absolutely indespensible book for anyone who wants to understand this issue is "The Solar Fraud" by Howard Hayden.
GavInTucson| 10.26.10 @ 10:40PM
After reading the headline and the first paragraph, I couldn't find the part where Weekly Standard went green.
aware| 10.27.10 @ 5:56AM
Why would anyone who wishes to be really informed read the collection of insider wannabes and their conformist propaganda at the WS?
The antidote to where we are requires a much more radical approach than is possible by the stuffed shirts and empty holes in the air found at Weeny Standard and Nationalist Review. Both are racing to irrelevance and obsolescence.
Looking to such as these only guarantees you'll be standing right under the brick wall when it crashes down.
Bryan Kelly | 10.27.10 @ 8:32AM
Loan guarantees are a hedge against governmental moral hazard. Surprisingly, many free marketeers do not seem to understand microeconomics.
Sean Holt| 10.27.10 @ 10:29AM
“Nuclear waste is a hellish material that no one knows how to handle”
Really? You may want to look into that a little further.
Enrico Fermi figured this out back in 1946 (Clementine reactor, Fermi-1 reactor (1957)) and your own Argonne Labs proved the concept beyond all reasonable doubt between 1984 and 1995. This was the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) Program.
Many of those new small, safe, portable, recyclable, factory built nuclear reactors to which you elude include IFR technology.
France stores all of her waste “in one room” because she recycles her spent fuel using the PUREX process which, not surprisingly, is illegal in the US. As a result, France gets 100% more energy per unit volume of fuel then does the US and every other country that uses a single pass
fuel cycle. Were France (and everyone else) to use the IFR cycle, energy recovery would increase to from 1% (single pass) or 2% (purex recycling) to 99.5% with breeding and full actinide recycling (IFR). That is an increase in efficiency just shy of two orders of magnitude! IFR solves forever any and all concerns arising from civilian nuclear energy.
It is ironic that the country that invented the only ultra safe, super efficient, pollution free energy source technology humanity will ever need for all of eternity would be doing everything in their power to prevent it’s use.
Ironic but hardly surprising based on the greed and intellectual capacity of most elected officials everywhere.
A problem not unique to the US!
Wind turbines indeed!
Sean Holt.
Marc Jeric| 10.27.10 @ 5:44PM
The demise of nuclear power started with the eco-nazis nominated by Carter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - one of the three was a Sierra Club main lawyer, another was Massachussetts Consumer Advocate. In other countries the commissioners must be nuclear scientists. Here any housewife can intervene in the licencing process; in France you must be accepted by the commission as a nuclear expert.
Vasu Murti | 10.28.10 @ 1:52PM
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory scientists estimate that if the U.S. became as energy efficient as Japan, it would save $220 billion per year on its energy bill. Nuclear power has proven to be a disaster: 116 plants have been canceled in the United States since 1973 and no new plants ordered since 1978. This has been an economic waste of more than $50 billion.
Nuclear power suffers from uncontrollable expenses due to construction, operation, maintenance and radioactive waste management. The nuclear waste that comes from nuclear power generation is deadly, and contains isotopes that remain toxic for up to 220,000 years. There is no safe way to dispose of it.
In June 1989, the citizens of Sacramento voted to shut down the Rancho Seco nuclear plant after 15 years of operation. The plant may be converted to solar power. The New York’s Shoreham nuclear plant will never operate due to public opposition. The nuclear industry ignored the public outcry, and it now costs the taxpayers and the industry $6 billion.
The nuclear power industry is an industry plagued with safety hazards, routine radiation releases, mismanagement, cost overruns, increased maintenance costs, extended outages and a dependence on federal subsidies. Forbes magazine has called the failed nuclear power program “the largest managerial disaster in U.S. business history,” costing as much as the space program and the Vietnam War combined.
According to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, moving from fossil fuel to nuclear power on a global level would require building a new reactor every one to three days for the next 40 years, at a cost of $200 billion per year. This would result in 300,000 tons of radioactive waste in the United States alone.
Reasonable alternatives exist. Solar energy is abundant, non-polluting and dependable. Electricity-producing wind turbines exist in 95 countries, with an installed capacity of 1,450 megawatts. They can be installed alone or in clusters. A coal or nuclear plant can take a decade or longer to plan or construct, whereas wind turbine clusters have been built in under 90 days. New wind systems generate power at six to nine cents per kilowatt hour, while electricity from new nuclear power plants costs 13 cents per kilowatt hour.
According to United Nations energy statistics, hydroelectric power supplies 21 percent of the world’s electricity, more than nuclear power. Hydroelectric power provides the most efficient, most reliable and lowest cost source of electricity, with production costs generally one-tenth those of nuclear power. Geothermal energy projects cost less than half the cost of nuclear reactors, and can be built in one-fifth of the time.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, nuclear power has become the least competitive of conventional electricity sources. Costs of $2 to $3 billion per plant are now commonplace, with some plants costing upwards of $5 billion. In contrast, while the price of electricity generated by solar energy is not yet as low as that from coal-fired plants, some technologies are already cheaper than nuclear-generated electricity.
The average output of nuclear plants is only about 60 percent of designed capacity, because many plants are forced to shut down frequently for repairs and maintenance. In the 1980s, the time required for construction of a nuclear reactor typically ranged from 8 to 14 years. The real roots of this problem lie in faulty and incomplete design work, inadequate quality control during construction and poor management.
General safety issues plague the nuclear power industry. These include the capability of safety control systems to survive fires, earthquakes or hydrogen explosions; the capability of reactor systems to respond to an emergency shutdown command; and the capability of a plant to withstand the loss of power needed to operate safety systems.
A typical nuclear power plant generates over 30 metric tons of highly radioactive material, which remains hazardous to humans for thousands of years. There is no easy solution to the disposal of nuclear waste.
According to Greenpeace, a 1989 Lou Harris poll found 62 percent of U.S. citizens strongly opposed to nuclear power. Like the environmental movement, the antinuclear movement has grown in past decades from a radical fringe element into a mainstream public concern. Questions to ask proponents of nuclear power are as follows:
1) How will the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) define safety standards for new reactors?
2) Will the quality of construction be better than in the past?
3) Where and how will the additional nuclear wastes generated by new plants be disposed of?
4) Will the nuclear industry be more willing to accept stringent regulation and enforcement than it has been in the past?
Until these questions are answered satisfactorily, nuclear power remains a risky solution to the energy crisis. Making use of energy-efficient systems, conserving energy, recycling, veganism, and becoming energy and environmentally conscious, however, are steps we can all take towards a sustainable world.
Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to John Robbins' Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987):
"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...
"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...
"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.
"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."
A pamphlet put out by Compassion Over Killing says raising animals for food is one of the leading causes of both pollution and resource depletion today.
According to a recent United Nations report, Livestock's Long Shadow, raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined.
Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.
"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation."
---Union Nations' Food and Agriculture Association
70% of the grain grown and 50% of the water consumed in the U.S. are used by the meat industry. (Audubon Society)
Over 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock. (Greenpeace)
It takes nearly one gallon of fossil fuel and 5,200 gallons of water to produce just one pound of conventionally fed beef. (Mother Jones)
Farmed animals produce an estimated 1.4 billion tons of fecal waste each year in the U.S. Much of this untreated waste pollutes the land and water.
Meat production causes deforestation, which then contributes to global warming. Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and the destruction of forests around the globe to make room for grazing cattle furthers the greenhouse effect.
The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reports that the annual rate of tropical deforestation has increased from 9 million hectares in 1980 to 16.8 million hectares in 1990, and unfortunately, this destruction has accelerated since then. By 1994, a staggering 200 million hectares of rainforest had been destroyed in South America just for cattle.
"The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and sub-division developments combined."
---Philip Fradkin, in Audubon, National Audubon Society, New York
Livestock production affects a startling 70 to 85 percent of the land area of the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union. That includes the public and private rangeland used for grazing, as well as the land used to produce the crops that feed the animals. By comparison, urbanization only affects three percent of the United States land area, slightly larger for the European Union and the United Kingdom. Meat production consumes the world's land resources.
Half of all fresh water worldwide is used for thirsty livestock. Producing eight ounces of beef requires an unimaginable 25,000 liters of water, or the water necessary for one pound of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.
The Worldwatch Institute estimates one pound of steak from a steer raised in a feedlot costs: five pounds of grain, a whopping 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 34 pounds of topsoil.
Thirty-three percent of our nation's raw materials and fossil fuels go into livestock destined for slaughter. In a vegan economy, only two percent of our resources will go to the production of food.
"It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the overpopulation of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."
---Jeremy Rifkin, pro-life AND pro-animal author, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, and president of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
According to the editors of World Watch, July/August 2004: "The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future--deforestization, topsoil erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease."
Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, similarly says in the February 1995 issue of Harmony: Voices for a Just Future (a peace and justice periodical on the relgious Left):
"...the survival of our planet depends on our sense of belonging--to all other humans, to dolphins caught in dragnets to pigs and chickens and calves raised in animal concentration camps, to redwoods and rainforests, to kelp beds in our oceans, and to the ozone layer."
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is challenging those who think they can still be "meat-eating environmentalists" to go veg, if they really care about the planet.
Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights similarly says:
"Merely by ceasing to eat meat
Merely by practicing restraint
We have the power to end a painful industry
"We do not have to bear arms to end this evil
We do not have to contribute money
We do not have to sit in jail or go to
meetings or demonstrations or
engage in acts of civil disobedience
"Most often, the act of repairing the world,
of healing mortal wounds,
is left to heroes and tzaddikim (holy people)
Saints and people of unusual discipline
"But here is an action every mortal can
perform--surely it is not too difficult!"
Les Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 10 percent per year, it would free at least 12 million tons of grain for human consumption--or enough to feed 60 million people.
Ken (Old Texican| 10.28.10 @ 2:47PM
Hey Vasu..
Screw you, vegetarian not wanting to eat grandma"!
I like beef. and grandma is with Jesus
Go touch an untouchable, (human being), and get back to me...dumb shit.
7d7| 10.29.10 @ 7:40AM
The Weekly Standard is not conservative. Elitist, without doubt. "Moderate" (i.e., RINO), almost without exception. Conservative, absolutely not.
gewell| 11.28.10 @ 5:21PM
Check out this website: http://www.hyperionpowergenera.....oduct.html
These small reactors are nothing like the ones being talked about in Popular Mechanics. That is already old news.
If we look at the small reactors built by Hyperion, one gets a whole different idea. If we drop these down into the ground at existing neighborhood substations, we could supply energy, on a conservative side, at about $60/per month per household. I came up with that by using a figure of 10,000 homes for 7 years (before they would have to be replaced), versus the 20,000 homes for 10 years, that the company asserts each unit can supply electricity for. ($50,000,000/10,000 homes = $5000 each. $5000/7 years = $714.28, or roughly $60/month/home)
These reactors are small, about 8 feet tall by 5 feet wide, and are totally self-contained. They can be shipped on trucks, dropped into the ground, and fitted into already existing infrastructure.
Think for a minute how much safer and more comfortable we would all be, if we no longer had to worry about the smog of coal produced electricity, the worry about chemicals used in solar panels (not to mention the absolute fact that we can't produce enough electricity with them), the absence of the unsightly wind turbines (and the noise they produce), the reliance on oil (and the fact that we are paying our radical enemies for it). The other aspect of these that excites me is the "safety in numbers." What do we do when our massive electric grids are brought down by our enemies, whether by computer hacking, or worse? With these little units dropped into thousands of individual communities, not connected to each other, we wouldn't have to worry about that. It would assure that if something happened to one community, the rest of us would still be able to respond.
We could put Americans back to work in the energy field, producing a system that could keep us energy independent, while simultaneously cutting the money flow to our enemies off.
Do we really have a choice, but to start thinking through this logically, and not politically?
Amory B. Lovins | 12.14.10 @ 5:19PM
I submitted the following reply to the Editor of the American Spectator on 1 November 2010. Since it was neither acknowledged nor published, I'll post it here and on www.rmi.org:
William Tucker characteristically misrepresents my "Nuclear Socialism" article (www.weeklystandard.com/articles/nuclear-socialism_508830.html). To claim I mistook new subsidies for old, he adduces an old citation I didn't give—then, ignoring my cited source of authoritative subsidy analyses, claims nuclear power's huge pre-2005 subsidies were zero. He blames the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for utilities' failure to propose the standardized, stable, licensable designs they promised. He even blames the NRC for the Constellation project's collapse, actually caused by economics so bad it couldn't take "yes" (a $7.5-billion taxpayer loan guarantee) for an answer. He claims nuclear power's success is proven by centrally planned power systems' buying it, even though market-based systems aren't. He makes up lots of other stuff.
My Weekly Standard article simply described how new U.S. reactors can't raise a penny of private capital despite 100+% subsidies, because they have no business case; how ever-rising subsidies are creating grave moral hazard and financial risk; and how the alternatives Tucker has long ridiculed are walloping nuclear power in the global marketplace. Just renewables, excluding big hydro dams, got $131 billion of global private investment last year and added 52 billion watts of capacity. Nuclear power, despite generally greater subsidies and mandates, got zero and lost capacity.
Tucker is irked that the marketplace continues to validate my three decades of analyses (which he claims just began) documenting nuclear power's gross uncompetitiveness—even for his imaginary "easily affordable" mini-reactors. But he is infuriated that The Weekly Standard put the free-market principles that it and I espouse ahead of any fondness for his favorite technology. Oddly, his complaint appears in your pages, not—like his 2001 tirade (www.rmi.org/rmi/LIbrary/E01-29_ToughLovins)—in the Standard's.
—Amory B. Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist
Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org)
richard carder| 12.31.10 @ 7:20AM
Dear Amory Lovins,
As a long-time campaigner against the proposed new nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point, Somerset, UK, it was exciting to hear that you recently were invited to speak to the Energy Dept. of our Government. - Just wondering if you have handy an outline of what you said to them, which you cd e-mail?
Richard Carder
PS we met many years ago when you spoke to the Ecology Party here (early 80s?) - keep up the good work!
wholesale beads | 3.30.11 @ 4:45AM
good read